Tomorrow We Face the Education Committee in the State Senate

Tomorrow morning we go to Santa Fe and face the college administration to try and speak for low income educational employees in the hopes of winning paid annual leave and paid holidays. We can’t buy support for our cause because we don’t have the money to pay lobbyist therefore we are forced to speak for ourselves. The colleges will have well paid lawyers and lobbyist to paid for their side of this and we will be but a few lowly paid individuals hoping to stand against the smoke and mirrors that they put forth in order to block our bill that would offer equality to instructional support staff.

State Senators have said that they support paying educational employees more and providing more support for education in this state but so far all the support I have seen is coming from our federal senators and congressmen who demanded that more money be put back into the economic rescue bill. Yet what was in that or any other bill that would increase the pay of educational employees. They can build large new buildings but what good will that be without the employees to staff those building. How can they talk about caps for CEO salaries and not speak of caps for educational administration salaries? The governor can reduce governmental administration salaries yet educational administration is guilty of taking low income staff pay increases and putting the money into their own paychecks. This may well be our last hope at equality and as my mentor instructor once told me all you can do is ask and the worst they can do is to say no. If they do say no then we will know for sure that their words were meaningless hype used to get votes from the voting public. Yet we already know that a few good progressive senators are staying to their word and fighting for the cause of education in this state.